Study On Textbook Illustrations Of Senior High English Textbooks Based On Multimodal Theory

The English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools(2017 Version2020 Revision)states that English textbooks are the key of English curriculum resources.With the deepening of educational reform and development,the content of the textbooks has also changed,showing a remarkable multi-modal characteristic.As an important part of textbooks,illustrations can cultivate students’ ability of analysis,observation and imagination and cultivate their aesthetic perception.The Standard English Experimental Textbook of Senior High School by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press(hereinafter abbreviated to as FLTRP Senior High School English Textbooks)are the new textbooks published in 2019 and already used in some areas in 2021.The new textbooks add more vivid illustrations into the Starting out section,and design activities related to“viewing”.Therefore,it is particularly important to promote English teachers’ understanding and use of the new textbooks and to cultivate students’ ability of viewing multiple pictures,This research selects the compulsory part(a total of three books)of the FLTRP Senior High School English Textbooks as the research sample.With Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar Theory and Martinec and Salway’s Image-Text Relation Theory as the theoretical foundation,it aims to study the following questions:(1)In the Starting out section of the textbooks,what are the ways of meaning construction of visual modes?(2)In the Starting out section of the textbooks,what are the relations between visual modes and verbal modes?(3)How do the activities on illustrations in the Starting out section of textbooks reflect the requirements of the English Curriculum Standards for the ability of “viewing”?Through the analysis of the new textbooks,this study draws the following conclusions:(1)the 77 illustrations in the Starting out section of the textbooks fully reflect the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning of visual grammar function.As for the representational meaning,conceptual representation is its main process,which reflects the new textbooks pay attention to cultivating students’ ability of understanding,analysis and induction.As for the interactive meaning,the contact relationship is mainly offering,the social distance is mainly medium and long distance and the attitude is mainly frontal angle and the eye-level angle,which reflects the new textbooks tend to present new information to students,making it easier for them to understand objective knowledge.As for the compositional meaning,the illustrations in the Starting out section are mainly located on the right side of the overall pages,so the information value is mainly reflected in the top right to convey new ideal information,and the bottom right to convey new real information,which reflects that textbooks tend to present new information to learners.Salience is reflected in the clear participants,high clarity,color saturation and tone value,which helps to attract students’ attention and improve their interest in English learning.The framing is mainly composed of lines,which can help the readers to better understand the content of the subject.(2)The relationship between pictures and texts in the Starting out section is mainly reflected in that text subordinate to image,followed by the complementary relation and image subordinate to text.These characteristics reflect that the new textbooks require learners to have a high ability to view the images,understanding and digging out the implied meaning of the illustrations.(3)From the perspective of activity design,the activities on illustrations in the Starting out section are mainly “speaking” after “viewing”,followed by “reading” after “viewing”.This shows that this part of the textbook intends to make full use of the characteristics of the illustrations,focuses on awakening students’ ability to read pictures,and emphasized the combination of “viewing” with other skills.This meets the requirements of the English Curriculum Standards to improve students’ oral expression by “viewing” and improve their abilities of understanding,inferring,comparing,analyzing and generalizing through “reading” and “viewing”.Based on the above conclusions,this study puts forward some suggestions for English teachers and textbook compilators to help them better understand textbook illustrations and flexibly use multimodal resources in teaching.This set of textbooks provides a good template for future textbook compilation,which can help textbook compilators make more reasonable use of multimodal resources to compile textbooks.